I am a former engineer and I was really excited about the possibility of building better technology to serve humanity. A lot of us as engineers have this belief that if you build a tool you somehow can empower humans economically or socially. The idea of building a better technology often means more efficiency.
Ramesh SrinivasanIn its early days the Internet seem to be a counter cultural space and an anti corporate space, now is the place for corporate economic production. What the internet is now isn't what it used to be and it doesn't have to be what it turns into.
Ramesh SrinivasanIf you share information widely, but you present that information in ways that fits your own view, you're actually still misrepresenting. So instead what you should do is figure out ways to build systems that allow people to experience and classify their information in ways that are meaningful for them.
Ramesh SrinivasanIf you create networks that allow people in their own local systems to have power and agency and sovereignty in their own systems. The idea that people could just know what's happening with their data. You could work with the platform, in communication with it, more than "I'm just like experiencing as a blind person in a black box".
Ramesh SrinivasanWe are getting close to the point where as every platform of tech that has any level of scale gets bought by either Google or Facebook or sometimes Microsoft. We are getting to the point where we see some oligopoly in terms of behavior online, and that it's really problematic because the oligopolies are completely non transparent, they are terrible in terms of labor and economic equality and they support systems of surveillance. It can create a world where we are all placed in bubbles, where the systems themselves can be manipulated by people who don't have our best interests in mind.
Ramesh Srinivasan